The Rabbit Hole

September 10, 2017

It seems like no matter how much experience I gain as a developer, and as a human being, time to time I end up going deep into some rabbit hole. This time, in one of those deadly spirals of random clicking on the net I ended up learning about Ethereum. How did I get from there to creating Hugo-based blog hosted on the InterPlanetary File System? I thought I was done with blogging. For all I know, this could be the first and last post.

It does not matter whether I am aware that what I’m doing will take me nowhere. I constantly ask myself during these quests into the rabbit hole: Why am I doing this? Who cares? Should I be doing something useful instead? Of course, I should. But no matter how much half of my brain, the rational one, tries to stop me, the other half just keeps beating that keyboard. I don’t think I even feel excited about the quest. I’m just possessed by a weird drive to finish. I’m fueled purely by the quick, ephemeral satisfaction of solving each micro-problem I encounter (IPFS daemon does not run? It can’t open the ports? Sure let’s dig into the docs to see how to change the config! Is the Hugo theme broken? Sure let’s put on the CSS hat and get to it! No matter how much I hate CSS, let’s just do it, because… just because). It’s those small mental masturbations that keep me going, all for nothing that’s for sure.

Whether I’m writing good old Java, or building Spark pipelines on Scala, or hacking Solidity smart contracts, or even resentfully poking some CSS… coding is very, very addictive. I wish I’d do more LSD than I code; it sure seems more insightful. But no, I can’t help it. I crave coding. I crave getting code intoxicated.